Seven of the eight people killed were women; six were of Asian descent. The suspect, according to police, appeared to blame his actions on a “sex addiction.”
While the U.S. has seen mass killings in recent years where police said gunmen had racist or misogynist motivations, advocates and scholars say the shootings this week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors targeted a group of people marginalized in more ways than one, in a crime that stitches together stigmas about race, gender, migrant work and sex work.
“In some ways this is another manifestation of the targeting of marginalized people in the U.S.,” said Angela Jones, an associate professor of sociology at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, whose research has focused on race, gender, sexuality and sex work.
The killings in Atlanta follow a wave of recent attacks against Asian Americans since the coronavirus first entered the United States, with the majority of reports coming from women. The 21-year-old suspect denied his attack was racially motivated and claimed to have a “sex addiction,” with authorities saying he apparently saw massage parlors as sources of temptation.
Police told a news conference Thursday that investigators believe the gunman previously visited two of the massage parlors, but it’s not yet clear if any the businesses offered sexual services. The Atlanta mayor said police hadn’t previously been there beyond a minor potential theft. Still, the suspect equated the parlors to sex, and that drove him to kill, police said.
“There’s this assumption that all these massage parlor workers are sex workers. That may or may not be the case,” said Esther Kao, an organizer with New York-based Red Canary Song, a group of Asian and Asian American sex workers and allies that does outreach to massage parlors. “The majority of massage parlors are licensed businesses that also provide professional, non-sexual massages.”
“There’s this assumption of sexuality and fetishization of Asian women’s bodies that is unique to this kind of crime,” she said.
At least one of the victims was a patron, not an employee. Thirty-three-year-old Delaina Ashley Yaun and her husband had gone to the spa on a date, her mother, Margaret Rushing, told WAGA-TV. Yaun leaves behind a 13-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter.
The shootings follow high-profile instances of race and gender-based killings in recent years by white men. In 2014, a 22-year-old who had railed against women online killed six people and wounded 14 near the University of California, Santa Barbara. The following year, eight Black church members and their pastor were shot and killed in a racist attack in South Carolina. In 2018, a Florida gunman with what police called a “hatred towards women” killed two and injured five at a yoga studio. The year after that a shooter targeting Latinos opened fire at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, killing 22 people.
“This is a thread that is woven through the histories of these gunmen. Toxic masculinity is truly a problem in this country,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action.
The fact the Georgia shooter targeted the businesses because he linked them to commercial sex is a nightmare scenario for those who work in erotic industries and are increasingly subjected to online harassment and attempts to report massage parlors to the IRS, said Kate D’Adamo, an organizer and advocate for sex worker rights. “At its core it’s about going out and targeting sex workers as fallen women, blaming them for social ills,” she said.
Prostitution laws mean women also fear reporting harassment or violence to police, afraid of being arrested themselves or their pleas ignored, she said. Those fears are even more pronounced for women of color, those who are immigrants or those with few language skills.
They feel they can’t report crimes to police, said Barbara Brents, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sociology professor who studies the sex industry. “When they do, sex workers are not taken seriously and they’re also subject to arrest themselves.”
Researchers who spoke to more than 100 Chinese and Korean workers at illicit massage parlors for a 2019 study found that while some women did say they felt deceived or coerced into jobs that involved sex work, many more chose the profession after having bad experiences in the few other types of generally low-paying jobs available to them, like restaurants and nail salons.
While there were some reports of exploitation or mistreatment by managers, an “alarming” 40% of women told researchers that a client had forced them to have sex in the last year, the study said.
In the Atlanta shooting, the suspect’s claims of sex addiction, meanwhile, ring hollow for some. It is not a condition recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, said David Ley, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction.” And while it was cited by celebrities for a time, the Harvey Weinstein case became an emblem of how it can be used as an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for abuse and assault, he said.
There’s also a disturbing thread of racism in some online discussions of sex addiction, he said.
“They hold other people — the porn industry, sex workers, even women in general — responsible for triggering these sexual desires in them they are afraid of,” he said.
Moral views can shape beliefs about sexuality, and friends described the Atlanta shooting suspect as being deeply Christian. He also told police he had planned to go to Florida to target the porn industry.
The sex-addiction claim is a way to redirect blame, Kao said. “He’s absolutely taking no responsibility and putting all of that on the workers themselves and it also distracts from the race issue,” she said.
Meanwhile, the suspect, Robert Aaron Long has been arrested on charges of murder and assault. It wasn’t clear yet if he had a lawyer who would represent him.
Police said Long confessed to the crime and told officials about a “temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
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Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City and Price from Las Vegas.
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Atlanta police on shooting probe: ‘Nothing is off the table’
ATLANTA (AP) — Police said Thursday that “nothing is off the table” in the investigation of the deadly shootings at two Atlanta massage parlors, including whether the slayings were a hate crime.
Those attacks and a third one near the suburban town of Woodstock killed eight people and prompted President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to change their plans for a previously scheduled trip to Atlanta. The pair postponed a political event in favor of meeting Friday with Asian American community leaders.
A 21-year-old white man, Robert Aaron Long, is charged with murder in Tuesday’s slayings. Six of those killed were women of Asian descent.
“Our investigation is looking at everything, so nothing is off the table,” Deputy Atlanta Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said at a news conference.
The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said it also was investigating whether the killings were hate crimes.
Georgia lawmakers last year passed a hate crimes law that allows additional penalties to be imposed for certain offenses when motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or disability. A hate crime is not a standalone crime under the law, but it can be used to add time to a sentence once someone is convicted of another crime.
Investigators believe Long had previously visited two of the Atlanta massage parlors where four of the women were killed, Hampton said.
Long told police that the attacks were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction, and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.
Long’s statements spurred outrage and widespread skepticism in the Asian American community, which has increasingly been targeted for violence during the coronavirus pandemic. Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker also drew criticism for saying Long had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did.”
Sheriff Frank Reynolds released a statement Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regrets any “heartache” caused by his words.
“In as much as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement.”
Baker was replaced Thursday as spokesman for the investigation, according to a statement from a county spokeswoman who said she would be handling future media inquiries about the slayings.
The sheriff’s statement did not address a 2020 Facebook post that appeared to have been written by Baker promoting a T-shirt with racist language about China and the coronavirus. Baker has not commented on the post, which was taken down Wednesday.
Meanwhile, lawyer J. Daran Burns issued a statement saying he had been appointed to represent Long. He offered condolences to the victims’ families and said he was working on Long’s behalf “to investigate the facts and circumstances” surrounding the slayings.
Long waived his right to an initial hearing in Cherokee County Magistrate Court on his lawyer’s advice, the statement said.
Biden and Harris had already been scheduled to travel to Atlanta to tout the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, but the trip took on new meaning after the shootings. The visit also comes amid an intense debate over voter rights in Georgia.
Biden and Harris, the first vice president of Asian descent, will instead meet with Asian American leaders to discuss threats against the community, meet with other local leaders and visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for an update on the pandemic.
Also Thursday, Biden directed that flags be flown at half-staff through sunset Monday in honor of the dead.
At a congressional hearing on violence against Asian Americans that was scheduled before the shootings, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler called for the government to “investigate and swiftly address” growing tensions but did not call for a specific course of action.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced legislation that would assign a person at the Justice Department to expedite the review of hate crimes related to COVID-19 and provide additional support to state and local authorities to respond to those crimes. But it is unclear if the bill by Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat, and Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, will get a vote.
Testifying at the hearing, Meng urged Democratic leaders to move the legislation and said lawmakers “cannot turn a blind eye” to people who are living in fear.
“Our community is bleeding,” Meng said. “We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”
There was some tension as a Republican on the panel, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, charged that Democrats were trying to control speech.
“When we start policing free speech, we’re doing the very thing that we’re condemning when we condemn what the Chinese Communist Party does to their country,” Roy said. “And that’s exactly where this wants to go.”
Meng responded angrily to Roy’s comments, saying Republicans “can talk about issues with any other country you want, but you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s-eye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”
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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Zeke Miller, Jonathan Lemire and Nancy Benac in Washington contributed to this report.